The Trouble With School Vouchers

March 19, 1990|By Robert Bonner.

``At the end of `Diary of a Madman,` `` writes Ariel Dorfman in the closing chapter of `The Empire`s Old Clothes,` ``Gogol`s protagonist screams, as his last warning to mankind and the audience, `Save the children`.``

``That is the basic question,`` Dorfman exclaims, ``a question that cannot be postponed. . . . How do we save the children?``

Chicago has only recently hit upon one promising way: The democratization of its schools under local councils. No doubt many other innovations are needed and worth trying. But for now, I`d like to dismiss one that I find particularly pernicious: School vouchers as a means of funding education.

Proponents of vouchers assume, wrongly, that by granting every school-age child an equal sum of money to be spent on whatever education a parent or guardian chooses, every child`s freedom to choose the type and quality of education desired would increase.

Thus it is assumed, again wrongly, that a ``free market`` would have innovative consequences for education. The assumption is that vouchers

(demand-side adjustments, or the purchasing power of parents), combined with a fully privatized school system (supply-side adjustments, or those businesses that would sell education for voucher dollars), would penalize the bad schools by driving them out of the business, thereby rewarding the better schools, which, profiting from voucher dollars, would prosper.

But voucher proponents fail to take adequate note of the kind of society we live in.

Vouchers presuppose a scarcity of educational resources. If everyone received an equal sum of money to compete in the ``free market`` for as many of these resources as they can buy, education would become all the more unattainable for pupils who command less purchasing power. They could not compete on equal terms with pupils who command more.

In short, proponents of the voucher system confuse freedom with economic power. Only in an absolute sense would vouchers increase the economic power of every pupil. However, we happen to live in a class society. Not everyone competes on an equal footing. Not everyone can. Since vouchers would subsidize all equally, including those who don`t need the subsidy, privatized education funded through the voucher system would not serve the positive ends cited in its justification. Access to a higher-quality education would continue to reflect social class-a more bald way of stating that ``freedom`` remains an empty husk when subjected to social conditions in which it cannot be realized in practice.

The lesson to be learned is easy enough to hear. Listen closely. We mustn`t save some of the children at the expense of abandoning the others. The voucher system, ofen trumpeted as a ``democratic`` reform comparable to Chicago`s local school councils, is in truth a ploy for preserving educational and class privileges, perhaps even exacerbating them.

So it`s not hard to see why so many of our contemporaries, for whom preserving privileges is seen as the be-all and end-all of legitimate state action, would rush to embrace the voucher system. For it was to employ the relative accessibility (or inaccessibility) to education as a means of shoring up privileges that vouchers were conceived in the first place.